Yet again, I have found myself in an evening of web browsing, which inevitably has lead me to into reads and studies of astronomy topics. Actually, I was watching Through the Wormhole, and I got excited by the general theme of what is happening in the universe. Between the television and the computer, I found a site that displayed details about some of the studies of what is happening in the cosmos.

I logged onto Popular Science, getting to an article which actually had been posted a couple of years ago. Through the Wormhole had me excited about some of the recent observations of Sagittarius A*, and what researchers are learning about our galaxy’s core. One article presented information about one of the more current studies of the center of The Milky Way.

During 2010, The Hubble Space Telescope viewed a star that is being ejected from the galactic center. This star is being nudged out of the galaxy’s core at extreme speeds, estimated to average around 1.6 million miles an hour! Astonomers, and those whom study related topics, recognize this to have happened because of that star’s interaction with a black hole.

Sagittarius A* resides at the center of our Milky Way. This star apparently drifted too closely to Sagittarius A*, in conjunction with two other stars to which it was gravitationally bound. Something akin to a three-way dance between the stars took place, as they swirled around the black hole. It seems that, while one of the stars continued with it’s swirl around the black hole, one star was sucked into it, and the third star was shoved out of the entire galaxy at a super speed!

This star is supposed to be moving at 1.6 million miles an hour! There’s your ticket! Yet, that actually is only one of several stars that have been flung from the galactic core. Called hypervelocity stars, rouge stars, or even high-speed ballistic stellar interlopers, these celestial objects are aging stars that are believed to have been parts of binary star systems. These dual star systems strayed too close to black holes. This particular case has one of these two stars, already near the galaxy’s core, drifting too closely to it’s binary companion. One of the stars was captured by Sagittarius A*, and the other was ejected out of region at an excessive speed, by the extreme gravitational force of the black hole.

This star that was ejected is supposed to be one of several which have been flung from our galactic center. Studying scientists using The Hubble Space Telescope are estimating that over 675 stars now reside within the outer regions of The Milky Way, having been jettisoned out of their original regions by Sagittarius A*! These particular stars have been labeled as hypervelocity stars because of the extreme speeds at which they are moving. Some of them are said to wind up within the outer regions of the galaxy, while others are flung from the galaxy entirely! The star at hand has been dismissed from the galaxy, and it is moving at rate that is three times faster than the rate at which The Sun is orbiting our galactic core!